Trying to resurrect the debate over the WWG report

I said that the opponents of the report would lose more by being denied the debate triggered by the WWG report. Accordingly, today a number, probably working in cahoots, have issued releases or made blog posts in an attempt to reignite the issue.

Time to dismiss Welfare Working Group report, The Greens

Welfare Working Group recommendations flawed without investment, COMVOICES

Wrong-headed Welfare Working Group miss the point,NZCTU

If only those poor people would stop breeding, The Hand Mirror

A beneficiary advocate says proposals to contract out welfare services will create an industry out of misery, Sue Bradford

The only one I have a reaction to is Meteria Turei's, on behalf of the Greens;

“The earthquake in Christchurch has shown the compassionate and supportive power of communities. In that context the Welfare Working Group’s report looks incredibly harsh and inappropriate.”

My feeling is that most New Zealanders can differentiate between emergency aid and lifestyle welfare. The WWG report is an attempt to deal with the latter.

By the end of December 2009 14,394 babies born that year were being supported by a main benefit. A big chunk of the ensuing dependency must have been preventable. The earthquake was not.

US job figures disappoint?

That's the headline. The question mark is mine.

The keenly awaited jobs figures have been released in the US and experts are disappointed.

Unemployment has dropped just below nine percent, and more than 190 thousand new jobs were created.

Government employee numbers dropped because of cutbacks but hiring in manufacturing, health care, construction and transportation numbers increased.

Experts say the 8.9% unemployment rate is still too high to consider the US economic recovery strong.

They say around 250,000 new jobs were needed at this time.

It is disappointing for those unemployed at this time but the really good news is the rebalancing.

There is the essential movement out of the public sector and into the private. Any recovery without that is artificial. It is the private sector that provides the jobs that create wealth directly or indirectly.

Sunday morning rave

Usually people label me as right-wing. Yet I have never been a National member, never voted for National and generally take so little interest in their party politics that I didn't even know whether Jami-lee Ross was a bloke or a girl until I googled the name and image after misinterpreting the opening line from a Standard post.

I was firmly in the ACT camp when it was classical liberal, which is not right-wing.

Classical liberal philosophy promotes above all else individual rights. It opposes the power of the state over individual rights.

On the other side are collective rights. These are pushed by left-wingers. They love the state because it promotes the interests of groups to the detriment of individuals.

But true right wingers are collectivists too. They want the state to promote the rights of groups they belong to. National has a few of those.

A lot of nonsense is talked about left and right in this country. And from time to time I even indulge in it myself for the simple reason that most people are too poorly educated to understand anything else.

There is no classical liberal party in this country currently. Some talk about National having a classical liberal wing but that's a joke. Especially when people regret Simon Power's resignation because he led their more liberal team. Power? He steered through many pieces of legislation that offended against individual rights. And plans to ram through more before November.

Some people just can't grasp the importance of individual rights. People like Sean Plunket who last week took a very illiberal position on his talkshow. He was aghast at the judge's decision about the Wanganui gang patch ban. He believes the wearing of the patch should be illegal across the country. So should gang membership and the very gangs themselves. He says that to get a patch someone has to commit a crime therefore all patch wearers are criminals.

It was gratifying to hear some people challenge him saying, punish the crime, not the process of association or expression of it. I put it to him that some gang leaders are trying to turn their gangs around, recalling an interview he did when he was still at Radio NZ. He interviewed a Sally Army rep and a gang leader over the matter of a group attending rehab at a location in Turangi. Plunket was hostile towards the gang member and seemed to be trying to stir up community unrest about the rehab activity. My point to Plunket was that some gang members do turn their backs on criminal activity but not on the gang. The gang is more than just men. It is their women and children. It is entirely possible that someone sports a patch when they are not currently criminal or have already served time for past misdeeds. I acknowledged it would be naive to believe many fitted the description. But tried to get him to see that the regalia itself should not be illegal. Still he insists that in the matter of gangs like the Mongrel Mob and Black Power there is no room for 'niceties' like freedom of expression, freedom of association, etc. On this matter he would sit quite comfortably in the ACT party.

Relating the exchange to my husband he broke into the famous passage, "First they came for ...

That is exactly why individual rights must be preserved at all cost, even when we don't like the individuals who rights we uphold.

And it is a sobering thought that there isn't a party in our parliament that bases its philosophy and actions on this idea.

The earthquake bill

An interview with Mike Hoskings, NewstalkZB, Thursday morning, about whether or not trimming Working For Families would go any way towards meeting the earthquake bill (starts at 20:41). Pieces were spliced into subsequent news bulletins and (to my frustration) I am still being described as a 'former ACT candidate'. It'll probably get carved into my gravestone.

ACT on message

Brief and simple so re-produced in full;

Hide - Vaulting Matilda March 4
Friday, 4 March 2011, 7:53 pm
Press Release: ACT New Zealand


ISSUE 15, March 4 2011
REPRIORITISE, REBUILD

These are grim times for Canterbury, and indeed for New Zealand. Our second largest city is devastated and the people of Christchurch are enduring the hardest of times.

We are now forced to make hard choices, to focus intensely on only the highest priorities – we need to face reality.

Our starting point is not good. Our government has been borrowing a massive $300 million per week simply to keep afloat. That’s almost $200 per week for each and every Kiwi household.

And now we have Christchurch to rebuild.

However it’s not just government that overspends – as a nation we have built up overseas debt of $162 billion, 85% of GDP.

We have seen the economic and social turmoil in the most highly indebted European countries. The future has arrived for them. Those in deep trouble were the countries with the highest current account deficits, the highest levels of overseas debt and the highest levels of government debt. If you need to know what the future holds on our present track, just look at the so-called PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

The reason we have so much wasteful, pointless and counterproductive government spending is that politicians have every incentive to spend more, and promise too much. As voters we encourage them.

The middle class want free childcare. Students want interest-free loans. Pensioners want pensions and gold cards. On and on it goes. Every interest group wants their own government department or agency. Helen Clark’s Labour government perfected the art of spending money on key interest groups to hold on to power at all cost.

We couldn’t afford that before the earthquakes and we absolutely cannot now. Government capital spending is going to increase as we rebuild Christchurch.

We must ensure now that the general good prevails over narrower self-interest. Government must live within a budget as tight as the budgets that ordinary households face.

Rodney Hide

Leader, ACT Party

New blog

A new blog coming in from Christchurch with an interesting take on the refugee exodus.

WFF - changes at the top-end won't cut it

Because the PM has suggested making Working For Families less generous in an attempt to find the money needed to pay for the Christchurch recovery the Labour vote-buyer is once again in the news.

Earthquake or no earthquake many economists regard these sorts of family spending programmes as highly ineffective and inefficient. As a vehicle to reduce child poverty they often result in more workless homes. Yes, the In Work tax credit (one of four WFF tax credits) was intended to get more beneficiaries into the workforce but at the same time an evaluation showed more partnered mothers left the work force. ( And then the recession wiped out the increase in single parent employment too.) At the very low income end Family Tax Credits to benefit-dependent families tend to keep people on benefits because of the high marginal tax rates they produce and the incentive that higher benefit-packages bring.

When Labour widened the scope of eligibility for family assistance and re-named it WFF they virtually doubled the cost in the interim period. In 2005, as the opposition leader John Key called WFF "a giant welfare package". And at some point "communism by stealth". That is still true but in order to win the 2008 election he decided he could not risk undoing the scheme. There are over 400,000 families with dependent children - nearly four in five - receiving an average annual entitlement of between $6 and 7,000. Obviously, however the higher up the income scale we go, the lower the payments are. So cutting them back at the top end isn't going to save the government very much money. Not when they are talking about a $5 billion drop in tax revenue due to the loss of economic activity in Christchurch.

Other reasons why WFF is a bad business include the privilege/ penalty process. Childless individuals and couples resent having to pay for other people's choices. No wonder so many migrate. Some research shows that families with children actually accumulate more wealth over a lifetime though larger homes and more constrained life styles. So why is the taxpayer expected to add to that wealth?

Churning significant amounts of income involves dead-weight loss. It is inefficient. The bureaucracy wouldn't be needed if the money was left in someone's pocket in the first instance, rather than taking it and giving it back.

Some people believe that family assistance programmes increase fertility rates but any correlation is uneven across various countries. In fact groups like the Child Poverty Action Group claim NZ puts a shockingly small amount of GDP into family assistance yet we have one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world. Many European countries they admire - Sweden, Denmark and Norway for instance - all have lower rates than NZ.

In the final analysis WFF was a vote-buyer. With NZ's current somewhat dire situation National has to persuade people of the right course of action. What is needed is not necessarily what they want. People do understand this. Key has to convince then to vote using their heads and hearts, and not through their pockets. The programme Labour introduced in 2005 should go.

(The likes of Lianne Dalziel will protest that cuts to spending are the last thing Christchurch needs. So make a temporary exception for Christchurch. The precedent is already set with special spending packages and, last year, the DPB reforms were deferred for Christchurch beneficiaries.)

Stigmatising drink-drivers

Here's a new idea, to me anyway. Various states of America require first time drink drivers to display what are called 'whiskey-plates' on their vehicles. This marks them for the police to pay special attention to and identifies them for the purposes of public reprobation I suppose. I can empathise with the arguments both for and against;

Washington has become the latest state to see a push for a so-called whiskey-plate law to combat drunk driving, a move defense lawyers and civil libertarians say can unfairly stigmatize offenders, and sometimes their families as well, reports the Wall Street Journal.

* The law would require first-time drunk drivers to replace their license plates with easy-to-spot tags that end with the uppercase letter "Z," a signal to police to pay close attention to the car.
* Minnesota, an early adopter of such a law, uses the letter "W" -- hence the term "whiskey plate" -- on a plain white background.
* Offenders in Washington would be required to display the special plates for three years after their driving privileges are restored.

Vanita Gupta, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said whiskey plates were part of a "trend of overcriminalization" in the United States. "These sorts of laws just create obstacles to offenders getting fresh starts and moving forward with their lives," she said.

A handful of other states have adopted similar laws.

* In Minnesota, certain drunk-driving offenders are required to attach special plates to their car for a year after their driving privileges are restored.
* An earlier version of the Minnesota law was enacted in 1988.
* Drunk-driving-related fatalities have fallen steadily since.

Cactus on capitalism, caring and Canterbury

I doubt this blog can add to Cactus' traffic but I must link to her latest piece if only to recognise and acknowledge its worth.

The Left's Deluded Monopoly on Caring


...Capitalism seeks to create wealth. Socialism seeks to buy votes by spending it. For years leftist tilting welfarism has destroyed New Zealand's chance of a nest-egg for this rainiest of days. Over-generous dollops of welfarism has spent up the nations inheritance for moments like these...

Blow out in long-term unemployed - Australia

The Age reports a "blow out in the long-term unemployed".

THE number of people on welfare benefits for more than a year has hit its highest since early 2002, with long-term recipients swelling by nearly 40 per cent since the global financial crisis.

Despite claims of skills and labour shortages, 349,806 people have been on Newstart Allowance for more than a year, according to Centrelink data for January, published by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

I stand to be corrected but surely this was to be expected after people who had been or would have been on the Parenting Payment - DPB equivalent - were required to either go onto or move to the Newstart Allowance.

Imagine if we did the same. Those parents with children 6 or older were moved onto the Unemployment Benefit. The long-term unemployed would increase.

But the journalist makes no mention of this. It seems a shallow analysis. Hence the conundrum of rising long-term unemployment set against falling unemployment.